India’s white-collar job market maintained its growth momentum in February this year, registering a 4% year-on-year increase, mainly driven by recruitment in the artificial intelligence (AI-ML) and hospitality sectors, a report said on Monday.
The job market started the new year on a strong note, reporting positive growth in both January and February.
“Moreover, this year looks even more promising given the 8% negative growth seen in February last year. While AI/ML adoption continues to trend well, it is also encouraging to see sectors such as hospitality leading the growth,” said Pawan Goyal, chief business officer at Naukri, citing the Naukri Jobspeak Index report.
Naukri JobSpeak is a monthly index that tracks Indian job market trends and hiring activity based on new job openings and recruiter searches on Naukri.com’s resume database.
Additionally, the report revealed that other sectors that performed well in February included real estate (9%), FMCG (8%), pharmaceuticals (5%) and GCC (2%), while banking continued to decline at 6%.
Although employment in the IT sector remained flat at an overall level, the report notes that the sector is showing signs of improvement, given the sharp decline seen throughout 2024.
Emerging IT cities such as Jaipur (19%) and Coimbatore (10%) bucked this trend by registering significant growth in IT employment.
Meanwhile, the number of new hires remained flat overall in February 2025, according to the report.
However, it added that the hospitality and telecommunications industries saw new hiring increase by 23% and 11% respectively.
